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enSat, 25 May 2019 16:12:51 GMTvBulletin60http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/images/misc/rss.pngWorld Affairs Boardhttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/
Who’s afraid of Imran Khan’s Pakistan? Almost everyone.http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67249&goto=newpost
Wed, 22 May 2019 18:19:03 GMT---Quote---
On Friday evening I drove back home to Islamabad after covering Pakistan’s July 25 general elections from the eastern city of Lahore. As I fumbled in my purse for my keys, the front door rattled and I heard footsteps on the other side.
“Madam, is someone else home?” my driver,...

Quote:

On Friday evening I drove back home to Islamabad after covering Pakistan’s July 25 general elections from the eastern city of Lahore. As I fumbled in my purse for my keys, the front door rattled and I heard footsteps on the other side.

Nothing was missing. In the lounge, we found one window, which locks from the inside, open. One officer said that maybe the intruder had left through that window. “Or maybe some khalai makhlooq was here,” another one joked.

He was using the Urdu word for “extraterrestrials” to suggest that I might have imagined the movements and sounds I was describing. The irony was lost on him: In Pakistan, khalai makhlooq is often used to refer to the army and its spy agencies, part of a rich political vocabulary born out of fear of openly criticizing the country’s most powerful institutions.

These “aliens” have for years been accused of piling pressure on civilian governments to toe their line, of threatening and abducting journalists and human rights defenders who speak up against them, of “disappearing” ordinary citizens on terrorism or other charges without due process and, most recently, of helping to rig a landmark general election in which cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan has emerged the undisputed winner.

In the hours that followed, after the police left and friends arrived to comfort me, I thought back to the several phone calls I had received in previous days from “well-wishing” army officers warning me not to write against the army. I remembered the words of one brigadier who called me three times about a tweet in which I reported about the army’s blocking of Dawn, the country’s oldest newspaper, saying that my words had generated a lot of anger among my Twitter followers and that “if one of them takes matters into his own hands, you will have only yourself to blame.”

But most of all, I thought about whether I had indeed imagined an intruder and whether my fear was unwarranted. But that was the point: An enduring sense of dread and paranoia at having crossed a thinly drawn red line, a fear of the unknown, is a reality for journalists who report on Pakistani politics, particularly on the power struggle between the military and civilian governments that is as old as the country itself.

The threats, as shadowy as they may sometimes feel, are all too real. Indeed, the country that Khan inherits as prime minister is practically run on scare tactics.

There is much in Khan to be afraid of. During his poison-tongued, invective-laden campaign, he pushed his supporters to the verge of war with news channels that criticized him. He has suggested that those who opposed him were “agents” of Pakistan’s archrival India and the “international establishment.”

He has supported a draconian blasphemy law that has led to at least 69 vigilante killings since 1990. Day after day on the campaign trail, he started fires and fanned flames, calling upon his followers to suspend disbelief and vest faith in conspiracies. And for someone who has for decades asked Pakistan’s young people — 64 percent of the population is under 30 — to join his revolution to overthrow the corrupt old political order, he has been much too quick to partner with turncoat politicians, Islamist hardliners and power-hungry soldiers.

Many have pointed to Khan’s mild-toned victory speech of July 26 to suggest that he was capable of grace and gravitas. But the fact is that his call for a more open, responsible foreign policy, even overtures to India and Afghanistan, ring hollow in the backdrop of years of peddling isolationism. His constant pandering to the religious ultra-right during the campaign and increasing support of conservative ideals suggest there is little reason to believe he is the person to lead Pakistan out of the clutches of extremism.

If he has indeed come into power with the help of the military, and there is much evidence that he has, then it is likely that the military will want its pound of flesh. He will need its help in finding allies and cutting deals, and the military will want even more space to control foreign and economic policy (with a 1.1 trillion rupee defense budget out of a total budget outlay of 5.9 trillion, no one cares more than the Pakistan army about what happens to the economy).

But if Khan is a genuinely popular leader who has surged into office because of a truly national following built on his cricket celebrity and appeal as an anti-corruption crusader, we can expect that he might want to be his own man and possibly stand up to the military. But even then, he must be very afraid to go the way of many former prime ministers before him: removed in a coup or marginalized using a combination of media and courtroom trials over corruption and sundry charges. In both scenarios, Pakistani democracy and Khan seem to be in imminent jeopardy.

Indeed, the manner in which Khan has betrayed the trust of many of his party’s old guard across the country is proof that he is capable of intelligent, even cynical, calculations about how to acquire and exercise power. Thus it is expected that he will not butt heads with the military. And so, Pakistan’s imperfect democracy will trudge along imperfectly, the wheels of government continuing to turn on the erratic whims of the boys in boots.

From the infidel Post
]]>Central and South AsiaOraclehttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67249RIP Bob Hawke - Former Australian PMhttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67248&goto=newpost
Fri, 17 May 2019 10:24:41 GMTSaturday's election here in Australia has been overshadowed by the death of former Australian PM Bob Hawke at the age of 89. Hawke led the nation from 1983 to 1991 and is rightfully considered one of our greatest leaders. He was simultaneously a profound intellect and a man of the people. At his peak he was our most popular PM and his legacy has been profound.

Hawke was a foundational figure in my political life. As a 13 year old I sat with my parents in my Dad's little flat watching the returns come in. My parents had been divorced for three years, but we watched as a family that night. He towered over my formative political years. The model of market based economics and social democratic social policies along with the idea that reform is best achieved by appealing to a broad base (later to become known as the 'third way') was implemented by Hawke & his treasurer (and successor) Paul Keating with a success few others ever achieved. The impact on my thinking remains.

Robert James Lee Hawke came from humble, if not impoverished beginnings. The premature death of his brother & a brush with death in his teens instilled a sense of urgency that propelled him for decades. At 18 he joined the Australian Labor party (ALP). His academic brilliance was such that he won a Rhodes scholarship. While at Oxford he established one of the first pillars of his legend - he set a world record (complete with Guinness Book of Records entry) for drinking a yard glass of beer. The man was destined to be PM ;-)

Back in Australia he took up a job arguing cases for better wages and conditions for workers. Hawke had experience as a manual labourer and a brilliant mind, making him a fierce advocate for workers. In 1969 he became a national figure when he became leader of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the nation's peak union body. A decade later he was in Parliament and already one of the most popular figures in the nation. In 1983 he became Labor leader in a surprise vote on the day the Liberal (conservative) government called an election thinking they were facing his less popular predecessor. He won the election in a landslide - the man of destiny had arrived.

Bob Hawke led the most talented ministry in Australian history. He and they learned the lessons of a failed reformist ALP government and set about the process of reform by taking the population with them. They managed to implement many of the market based reforms Thatcher & Reagan championed while expanding the social welfare safety net and combating discrimination of all types. All the reforms, few of the divisions. Hawke introduced the universal healthcare system we still use (medicare). It is so popular it remains the 'third rail' of Australian politics - do not touch! He also walked the world stage. As a union leader he was a fierce opponent of Apartheid. As a PM he became one of the strongest voices inside the Commonwealth against Apartheid, leading to some fierce clashes with Margaret Thatcher. When the tanks rolled over the students in Tiananmen square in 1989 he read a tearful account of events in Parliament and immediately granted all Chinese students in Australia refugee status. Hawke was a driving force behind the establishment of APEC.

Hawke the man was every bit as interesting. Despite his achievements he was never arrogant. he never lost the human touch - regularly responding to letters even as PM. When a 9 year old girl wrote to him distressed about her grandmother dying he responded with a letter both comforting and encouraging. His great abilities were also balanced by great flaws, about which he was very open. His love of alcohol was such that it resulted in a physical breakdown in the late 1970s. He publicly admitted he was an alcoholic and swore to give up drink - something he more or less did for his entire time as PM. he admitted he was not always the father he should have been. When it was publicly revealed that his daughter was a heroin addict his tears showed a human side few politicians of his era dared to show. Hawke was a ladies man, which caused great hurt to his wife Hazel, a figure as beloved in Australia as he was. After leaving politics he left her to marry Blanche D'Alpuget, a woman with whom he had an affair years earlier when she wrote a biography of him. The bond with Hazel remained, however. When she got dementia & her health deteriorated he was a regular visitor, sometimes lying on the bed and singing to her. He was with her at the end, as Blanche was with him at his end.

Above all Hawke remained a stanch Labor man. to the end. Too unwell to attend the campaign launch this week he still issued a public letter endorsing the current opposition leader. The wave of grief & emotion that swept the nation today was felt most keenly among the Labor faithful. In a TV interview the deputy opposition leader almost broke down as she spoke of his friendship. A lot of us shed tears today. He really was one of us. Sadly his expressed desire to see the ALP win the election tomorrow will not come to pass, but hopefully the Labor faithful will honour his legacy at the ballot box.

He was a remarkable man. We were lucky to have him.
]]>East Asia and the PacificBigfellahttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67248Back after a long, long timehttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67247&goto=newpost
Tue, 14 May 2019 07:14:29 GMTHi Guys,
My apologize for the long disappearance. Work and family has kept me busy (all the right reasons I guess). I am well and doing good. Hopefully I shall remain connected as I did before.Hi Guys,

My apologize for the long disappearance. Work and family has kept me busy (all the right reasons I guess). I am well and doing good. Hopefully I shall remain connected as I did before.
]]>World Affairs Board Publemontreehttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67247Xi Jinping Wanted Global Dominance. He Overshot.http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67245&goto=newpost
Tue, 07 May 2019 13:00:32 GMTChina wasn’t ready for the trade war with the United States.

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The endgame in the trade war between China and the United States seems near. President Trump, betting with real currency — American strength — apparently has the upper hand, and the concessions President Xi Jinping is likely to make won’t be mere tokens. When — if? — an agreement is finally announced, Mr. Trump will surely fire off bragging tweets, partly to shore up his credentials for a second term, amid personal and policy troubles. For Mr. Xi, almost any deal could mean a very serious loss of face.

Mr. Xi assumed power when China was still riding high on its so-called economic miracle (and the United States remained mired in the aftereffects of the 2008-9 recession). He became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) in late 2012 and president of the People’s Republic in early 2013. His anticorruption campaign was instantly popular. He championed the “Chinese Dream,” a vague vision of prosperity, strength and well-being for the country and its people, that seemed to fire up many citizens. His proposal to President Barack Obama to establish a “New Model of Major Country Relations” could only please Han-majority Chinese with imperial yearnings.

But those were easy stunts, performed in a country with no audible opposition and that bans “reckless” talk about the government. The trade war, on the other hand, is the first real occasion to assess Mr. Xi’s leadership capabilities. And his performance might not look so good, even if one discounts the setbacks related to the trade war.

First and foremost, Mr. Xi has utterly failed to manage the United States–Chinese relationship. In contrast, every Chinese leader since the founding of the communist state in 1949 had recognized the paramount importance of those ties, worked hard to improve them — and reaped huge benefits.

Mao staged Ping-Pong diplomacy to break the ice in 1971, and President Nixon supported him in his standoff against the Soviet Union. Deng Xiaoping went all-out to woo the United States, and President Jimmy Carter switched recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. During the 1980s, the C.C.P. leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang invited Milton Friedman and other American economists to visit and provide advice; after that, American capital and technology started flowing into China. In 1997, Jiang Zemin made an eight-day visit to the United States — at one point, while in Williamsburg, Va., putting on a three-cornered colonial hat. Bill Clinton then gave China a strong push to enter the World Trade Organization in 2001.

The Hu Jintao years, 2003–13, saw China’s most tactful exploitation of American openness (and naďveté). Cheap Chinese imports created runaway bilateral trade deficits for the United States. The Confucius Institutes, a network of language schools cum influence agencies, began to take root in American universities and high schools. (Today, there are more than 100 throughout the United States.) Chinese venture capitalists flooded Silicon Valley with money raised in American financial markets — then quietly siphoned off cutting-edge American expertise and injected it into China’s own high-tech hub.

But Mr. Xi has been aggressively hard-line. Under him, anti-American rhetoric has spread in official media. The Chinese government has been explicit about wanting to challenge the United States’s military presence in Asia. It has made aggressive moves toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea. It has sent Chinese battleships through American waters off the coast of Alaska. (It claimed to only be exercising the internationally recognized right of “innocent passage,” but the move clearly was a show of force.)

State authorities in Beijing try to co-opt members of China’s vast diaspora, hoping to develop a network that will facilitate political infiltration into other countries and high-tech transfers out of them. To this end, they resort to both overt schemes, like the Thousand Talents Plan, an official headhunting program, and covert tactics overseen by the C.C.P.’s influence machine, the United Front.

These efforts have set off alarms among some Americans. In 2017 and 2018, two groups of blue-ribbon scholars and ex-officials from previous United States administrations advocated a fundamental change in America’s view of China. Their members were moderates and mostly well-disposed toward China. Yet some of their recommendations dovetailed with the views of the Trump administration hawks who consider China to be America’s number-one enemy and security threat. Mr. Xi, apparently oblivious to this sea change, was caught unprepared when Mr. Trump hit China with a tariff war.

The dispute is having a knock-on effect elsewhere in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and Europe. After a summit in Brussels last month, China agreed to grant European Union countries “improved” market access, stop the forced transfer of technology and discuss the possibility of curtailing state subsidies to Chinese companies, which, other governments say, gives them an unfair competitive advantage. Although these concessions were presented in the mild, mutual-promise language of a joint statement, they were a clear setback for China and will blunt its global ambitions.

Why is all of this happening under Mr. Xi? History suggests an answer.

In the late 1950s, Mao began to challenge the Soviet Union’s leadership of the international communist movement, then a potent force that hoped to overturn the United States-led world order. Mao was also seeking global dominance, in line with the traditional concept that the emperor of the Middle Kingdom was the rightful ruler of “tian xia” (天下), everything under the heavens. But Mao overreached; China wasn’t strong enough for that then. The Soviet Union’s decision to scrap aid programs to China and pull out its scientific and technological advisers there dealt a severe blow to China’s underperforming socialist economy.

Like Mao with the Soviets, Mr. Xi may have challenged the global leadership of the United States too hard and too soon.

Mr. Xi’s second major shortcoming has been his failure to articulate a coherent set of policies to stop the Chinese economy’s long-term weakening, after many years of stellar performance. China’s gross-domestic-product growth in 2018 was the weakest in 28 years. The figure for the first quarter of this year was 6.4 percent, compared with the record high of 15.4 percent for the same period in 1993. Even that number would be the envy of many Western states, but the decline should concern China’s leadership because it underlines the country’s structural problems — notably, a rapidly graying population, a shrinking labor force and a total debt-to-G.D.P. ratio that neared 300 percent in the first quarter of 2018. The Japanese bank Nomura has estimated that defaults on bonds denominated in renminbi (also known as yuan) quadrupled between 2017 and 2018.

Weighed down by demographics and debt, China can hardly expand through more private investment and consumption. Worse, since its economy already has some huge excess capacities (think newly built ghost towns), government stimulus isn’t very effective. According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2008, it took one trillion yuan of credit to generate one trillion yuan of economic output; by 2017, the ratio was 3.5-to-1.

Yet Xi has done little to address these structural issues.

Evidence of severe demographic problems had become apparent by the late 2000s, but in 2016 Mr. Xi merely replaced the one-child policy with a two-child policy. Too little, too late. China’s number of newborns per year has dropped since the changes. The 2018 total was the lowest since 1961, a year struck by a terrible famine. Mr. Xi signed off on an economic stimulus package in 2015 that was 25 percent larger than his predecessor’s emergency plan in 2009, which had been implemented as a response to the global financial crisis. And again, in January and February of this year alone, even while Mr. Xi has been paying lip service to the need to wean the economy off state support, the government offered new loans and financing exceeding the package for all of 2015, according to an article in Forbes.

A third criticism of Mr. Xi is that under him, China has sponsored or condoned actions by Chinese citizens and entities worldwide that have damaged the country’s international reputation while degrading its own moral fabric.

Take intellectual property, for example. The United States seems to have hard evidence that it was the policy of Huawei, a flagship Chinese high-tech company, to reward employees for I.P. theft. And, as I have written before, such a policy is encouraged, arguably even mandatory, under China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law.

Traditionally, the ideal Chinese state is a Confucian state that adheres to strict moral and behavioral norms. Yet for all his cracking down on corruption at home, Mr. Xi has encouraged moral turpitude abroad; his vision of China is a nation of patriotic thieves. All Chinese arguably have lost face as a result, and now innocent people overseas may be dismissed out of hand as guilty by association.

Mr. Xi is widely seen as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. After the Constitution was amended last year, he could be president for life — unless his serious failures of leadership give his opponents at home enough reason to cut him short.

Original article contains a lot of hyper links.
]]>East Asia and the PacificOraclehttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67245Common mynahttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67244&goto=newpost
Sat, 04 May 2019 15:29:42 GMTRains are 24*7 here during monsoon, and also because of Cyclone Fani and last Wednesday afternoon my neighbour alerted me about a bird in the storm drain. That bird is tasty (flightless bird). I grabbed a stick and quickly made my way to the drain. I saw a bird, all wet, gasping for breath and...Rains are 24*7 here during monsoon, and also because of Cyclone Fani and last Wednesday afternoon my neighbour alerted me about a bird in the storm drain. That bird is tasty (flightless bird). I grabbed a stick and quickly made my way to the drain. I saw a bird, all wet, gasping for breath and trying its best not to drown. It was not that bird which I thought would be. There were like 100s of crows, gathered and screaming, free dinner for them.

I picked it up, when my people started to shout that I have to take a bath and then get inside the house. There is a tap outside, connected to the gravity flow water tank. The bird was shivering, out of breath, and dirty. We both took a bath. I had to strip down to my underwear, the bird was naughty he/she didn't wear any. :D

Then it was time to think what to do with it. I have never rescued a bird, and most of the times my carnivorous instincts get the better of me. So I lit up my BBQ (kind of) stove, with woods I saved (trimming plants and trees), tied a rope to one of the bird's legs and sat there. I tied a rope to its leg as it would be dark soon, and as far as I know birds can't see anything in the dark, and it would drown again/die if it tries to fly and escape. The other fear being crows surrounding me and the birdy.

I told em' crows, there's no dinner for ya'll tonight. Below are some pics.

Warming by the fire.

It got dark, so I took it inside. It was almost dry by then. It started to fly and make noise. High pitched obnoxious noise. I could sense that it was scared. They do it every morning at around 4 AM near my window, and every morning I want to kill them. This time it was different. Put some water and a mixture of crushed lentils and rice for it to eat, should it get hungry.

Next morning, its partner, and its relatives came and all of them were making a lot of noise, I couldn't sleep, and finally got up. Did my usual morning routine, and took one of my socks (protection from bird bite) and wore it around my hand to release the bird. I cut the rope, and let it loose. It flew some distance, started shaking its body, did an about turn (thanking me probably or cursing me for the night of bondage), then flew away. Around 15 aerial meters in its flight, it was joined by its partner. Loved that view.

We call this bird 'shalik'. Its English name is common myna. They are in the lacs here, with its nasty voice, they are annoying. But I'd save it again if I have another chance. This world belongs to them equally as it belongs to us.

High in the Karakoram, the stubborn armies of India and Pakistan have faced off for 19 years on the Siachen Glacier, the world's highest battleground and a flash point in the deadly dispute over Kashmir. In this exclusive report, an American writer and photographer spend two months inside the ultimate no-man's-land, witnessing the human and environmental devastation of a conflict without end.

We are marching up a strip of shattered rock laid out between two streams of the purest white, frozen highways extending in giant ripples toward the head of the Siachen Glacier - the largest glacier on earth, nearly two trillion cubic feet of ice. The air was frigid and the light crackled with the crystalline clarity found only above 16,000 feet. The sky was an unusually deep blue hue that bordered on violet, a violet that shaded into black, a black that warned of cold that could pop bones and stop the dance of molecules dead in its tracks. Up ahead rose a snowy 18,950-foot saddle that marked the end of the Indian subcontinent and the beginning of Central Asia. From its crest you could gaze into India, Pakistan, China, and Tibet. Surrounding us on all sides was an unbroken wall of pinnacles-huge cetacean humps barnacled with impossibly large cornices, seracs, and needlelike spires.

"I am so happy to be in these mountains!" cried Mohmad Yaseen Khan, a 47-year-old Kashmiri Muslim who was serving as our guide and cook. "The number of peaks I want to climb here is...is...well, I will have to make a special trip back just to count them. See how each one shines in a different way? See how their shapes are different? This is a place where a mountaineer would want to be buried."

Within a 25-mile radius of where we stood, 48 peaks rose above 19,000 feet; only 16 of these have names, and only six have been climbed. Above them towered 27 giants with altitudes exceeding 23,000 feet. Thirteen of these have never been scaled, and they include some of the greatest remaining prizes in Himalayan mountaineering: Saltoro Kangri II, four peaks in the Apsarasas group, and another three in the Teram Kangri group.

But there's a reason these mountains remain untouched: They sit in the middle of a 250-square-mile war zone where India and Pakistan have been fighting for the past 19 years as part of their intractable dispute over the state of Kashmir. What might be a climber's paradise is instead the site of a harrowing and improbable siege, the highest and coldest combat theater in the history of the world.

For four days, Yaseen and I, along with photographer Teru Kuwayama and 11 Ladakhi porters, had slogged up the middle of the glacier, ascending through a series of Indian army camps, toward a place called Kumar Base, a bleak outpost at 16,000 feet that serves as the central supply depot for two battalions of Indian troops. Daily artillery barrages and small infantry skirmishes occasionally mushroom into full battles, but for most of this war, India and Pakistan have been mired on the ice, burning up huge amounts of resources and manpower to hold the lines at heights that reach 22,000 feet.

At Kumar Base, the by-products of this stalemate were glaringly apparent. The camp is a cluster of 20 fiberglass huts and tents shared by some 35 officers, enlisted men, and porters. Perched on the crest of a massive, scabrous pile of reddish-brown rubble roughly 60 feet high and 900 feet long, it has the same features as the surrounding mountains - cols, ridges, arĂŞtes - with one significant difference: It's made of garbage.

We picked our way through the scab with the kind of care normally reserved for a high Himalayan traverse. At the base of the camp, a recent avalanche had disgorged burlap sacks, old door frames, mortar boxes, rolls of bailing wire, and pieces of fiberglass. Running down the flanks were chutes filled with an unstable layer of plastic sunscreen bottles, bent stovepipes, charred wood, helicopter wheels, and rotting vegetables. As we trudged toward the summit, precarious cornices threatened to crack off and bury us in a deluge of empty jerry cans, burst oil drums, tattered parachutes, ammunition cases, crushed cartons of mango juice, box upon box of two-minute masala noodles, and large metal containers labeled ANTI-PERSONNEL MINES.

All of the other camps we'd passed through were miniature versions of Kumar, and their collective filth - a dietary and industrial record of nearly two decades of uninterrupted war - was bound for the same destination: the bowels of the glacier. From there, this toxic compost would leach into the headwaters of the Nubra River, and then into the Shyok River, the Indus River, and ultimately into the Arabian Sea.

There was no wind to disperse the odor that hung over Kumar like a malignant bouquet: raw kerosene, raw vegetables, raw sewage. I breathed it in, tasted it. Even by the standards of men who are too busy fighting one another to care about the damage they've done to a magnificent ecosystem, I this was too much.

Yaseen, however, seemed oddly cheerful about it all. "I am so I happy to have come here and been given the chance to see this garbage!" he declared. I asked why.

"Why? Because many of my friends in the army told me about ; how much trash was here and how it has spoiled the glacier, and I didn't believe them. But now I've seen it for myself. Now I know that my friends were telling the truth."

THE MOST CRITICAL SECTION of the 1,800-mile border between India and Pakistan is a 450-mile line that cuts through the valleys and mountains of Kashmir. Here, for more than half a century, at least 500,000 Indian and Pakistani troops have faced off. In 1965 and again in 1971, the armies fought two conventional wars, both of which Pakistan lost. Since the late eighties, the border has also been the focus of a brutal guerrilla-style conflict. While thousands of Islamic militants trained in Pakistan have crossed the border to wage jihad, Indian security forces in Kashmir have imprisoned, tortured, or executed hundreds of civilians suspected of collaborating with the militants. In the past 14 years, more than 36,000 Kashmiris have died. These facts alone would probably qualify it as the most dangerous border in the world, even if it did not harbor the potential to trigger a nuclear holocaust.

Ten years ago, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency concluded that Kashmir was emerging as the most likely place on earth for a nuclear war to break out. This seemed imminent in the early spring of 1999, when 800 Pakistan-supported militants seized a 17,000-foot ridge overlooking the cities of Kargil and Dras in India-controlled Kashmir and began shelling a vital Indian military road that connects Srinagar to Leh and the Siachen Glacier. India responded with full force, and by early May of that year there was heavy fighting along 100 miles of the border. The situation was especially unstable: Only twelve months earlier, India and then Pakistan had each carried out successful nuclear detonations for the first time. By July 4, when the Clinton administration forced Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif to back down, both sides had reportedly put their nuclear strike forces on alert.

The origin of this larger conflict can be precisely dated to midnight on August 15, 1947, when Britain's Indian Empire was officially partitioned into the new nations of India and Pakistan. The upheavals of Partition produced one of the largest migrations of refugees in modern history - some ten million people - and the slaughter of as many as one million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims as neighbor killed neighbor during the chaos that ensued. Another casualty was the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir (commonly referred to simply as Kashmir), which had a Muslim-majority population ruled by a Hindu maharajah and would soon become the object of a bloody tug-of-war. Two months after Partition, India and Pakistan crossed swords over Kashmir, and they've never really stopped.

When the first round of full-blown fighting ended in January 1949, two-thirds of Kashmir was in Indian hands, including Jammu, the Buddhist region of Ladakh, and the biggest prize of all, the legendary Vale of Kashmir. Pakistan got the regions of Gilgit and Baltistan, which it now calls the Northern Territories, plus a sliver of southwestern Kashmir. According to the United Nations, the final disposition of the entire region - pending to this day - is to be determined by a plebiscite among Kashmiri citizens, the majority of whom are still Muslim. Until that vote takes place or an acceptable alternative is put forth, the de facto border has been the cease-fire line, now known as the Line of Control, which begins near the Indian city of Jammu and cuts a wobbly path northeast toward China.

That line stops well short of the Chinese border at a map coordinate known as NJ9842. At the time of the cease-fire, no fighting had taken place beyond this point because the area was too remote. Negotiators from both countries simply agreed that, starting at NJ9S42 the line would be understood to extend "thence north to the glaciers."

Those five ambiguous words were a ticking time bomb. In the spring of 1984, after three decades of cross-border hostility, armies from both countries raced to seize two key passes on the Saltoro Ridge, which originates not far from NJ9842 and forms the western wall of the Siachen. Since then, the war has been fought largely in secret, its front lines rarely observed by outsiders or foreign journalists. All along the Saltoro Ridge, Indian and Pakistani soldiers have erected between 120 and 150 outposts perched at elevations ranging from 9,000 to 22,000 feet. The locations of most of these, their routes of access, even their names, are closely guarded secrets. The total number of combatants is unknown, but probably falls between 8,000 and 10,000. The death toll is also classified, with estimates ranging between 2,500 and 4,000 killed since 1984. The cost of the war is murky, too; together the two countries are estimated to be spending between $182 million and $438 million a year.

Here's what is beyond dispute: Never before have troops fought for such extended periods in such extreme physical conditions. At least twice a week a man dies, occasionally from bullets or artillery, but more often from an avalanche, a tumble into a crevasse, or a high-altitude sickness - perils usually faced only by elite climbers. Not surprisingly, the men who serve in the war regard it as the supreme challenge for a soldier.

"Minus 50 at 21,000 feet - it's beyond anything the human body is designed to endure," an Indian officer on the Siachen told me. "This is the ultimate test of human willpower. It's also an environmental catastrophe. And - no doubt about it - things can only get worse."

LAST AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER, after securing access from the Pakistani and Indian armies, Teru and I trekked to both sides of the Siachen conflict to get a look at this highest and most hidden of military standoffs - the first American journalists to do so on foot. It was a tense time. Islamic militants had bombed the Indian Parliament in New Delhi the previous December. By the summer, a million troops were deployed along the border. When we arrived in Pakistan, British and American diplomats had just succeeded in getting the two countries to step back from the brink of a nuclear exchange.

Our journey began in Khapalu, a town on the Shyok River, where we met Major Mohammed Tahir Iqbal, the second-highest-ranking officer at brigade headquarters for Pakistan's Siachen operations. The major greeted us in his office, then took us outside to view a concrete scale model of the entire Siachen theater. "Our objective is to foil the Indian designs," he explained, waving a long bamboo stick to point out various features of the model. "We are just trying to maintain operational readiness so that they do not think of any further mischief."

Easy enough to say, but by almost any measure - military might, economic clout, political stability, population - India is more powerful than Pakistan. And it never lets Pakistan forget it. To compensate, Pakistani soldiers exhibit a spirited swagger, which can be fierce, comical, and endearing. Dressed in a tan one-piece uniform and speaking with clipped military precision, Tahir combined a little of everything as he clomped about on the Siachen model in his heavy black boots.

The model featured more than 100 white-capped mountains and ridges, blue rivers, and carefully labeled flags marking each army's bases and posts. To the east and west stood a dense thicket of peaks divided by the two main rivers cutting through the region, the Indus and its mighty tributary the Shyok. There were few towns, roads, or bridges. Several glaciers were splayed across the map, the largest of which, by far, was the Siachen, which ran in a long diagonal line from northwest to southeast. Running parallel to the Siachen on its western side was a massive, virtually unbroken wall of peaks and escarpments. This was the Saltoro Ridge.

Looking at the impenetrable mountaintops, you could see why almost a century passed between the first report of the Siachen Glacier's existence - by the British explorer William Moorcroft, in 1821 - and its first survey, in 1912, by the American team of Fanny Bullock Workman and her husband, William. You could also see why climbers have been intrigued: Here, deep in the Karakoram, an entire sea of virgin peaks lay waiting to be bagged.

During the decade after the first ascent of Mount Everest, by Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, virtually all the great peaks in the eastern Himalayas of Nepal were climbed, including Cho Oyu, Lhotse, and Dhaulagiri. Soon enough, mountaineers turned their gaze to the Karakoram, which contains four of the 14 highest mountains on earth - most notably K2, first summited by an Italian team in 1954. The door to the Karakoram was mostly shut, however, during the two wars that India and Pakistan fought over Kashmir in 1965 and 1971. Then, in 1974, Pakistan's Ministry of Tourism decided to open the region again, issuing permits allowing foreign expeditions to climb on the Baltoro Glacier, near K2, and to explore the no-mans-land around the Siachen.

Between 1974 and 1981, at least 16 major expeditions climbed up to the Siachen and beyond - 11 from Japan, three from Austria, and one each from Britain and the United States. Pakistan's motive for issuing the permits, it seems, was a desire to promote mountain tourism. But as expedition reports circulated through the mountaineering community made clear, the foreigners had concluded that the Siachen belonged to Pakistan. This impression also took root in the minds of the Pakistani government, and today the list of these expeditions is often cited as proof of ownership. "Our contention," Tahir told me, waving his stick, "is that this is our area."

India says the same thing, and both sides are unwilling to admit that neither has a solid legal claim to the region. (To avoid being dragged into the conflict, the United States has steadfastly refused to take a side.) Robert Wirsing, a professor at the U.S. Navy's Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu and one of the world's leading experts on the dispute over Kashmir, puts it more bluntly. In his view, the claims of both sides are equally spurious. "The Indian arguments are absolutely 100 percent false, and so are Pakistan's," says Wirsing. "The Pakistanis have no right to base their claim on permits issued to foreign mountaineers. And the only strength to the Indian argument is that it's backed by a force that cannot be dislodged."

Neither side is budging, but judging from Tahir's map, the Pakistanis definitely face an uphill task. The entire Saltoro Ridge, including the two highest passes that connect Pakistan to the glacier - Bilafond La at 18,200 feet and Sia La at 18,850 feet - is bristling with red flags: Indian army posts. On ridges running parallel but at significantly lower elevations, you see a corresponding belt of blue flags: the Pakistani posts.

Tahir reluctantly conceded that the Indians own the high ground, but insisted that Pakistan has "better communications, better roads, and better motivation." And that wasn't all.

"Morally," he said, bringing the tutorial to a close, "we occupy the high ground."

TO REACH THE FRONT LINES we drove along the Shyok, then headed deep into the mountains to a village called Dansam, a hub for roads leading to the major Pakistani combat sectors. Our destination was a base called Ghyari, which is lodged at 12,400 feet in a narrow valley leading up to Bilafond La. We arrived on an August evening under a canopy of stars, coming to a halt beneath a wooden marquee emblazoned with the words GUARDIAN OF THE FROZEN FRONTIER.

Ghyari sits between soaring granite walls as bold and majestic as El Capitan, threaded with waterfalls that turn to mist before they hit the valley floor. Farther up this valley lie several Pakistani artillery batteries, which lob shells at the Indian posts dug in on the ridges above. Ghyari is a supply center and rehab station for worn-out soldiers - they recuperate after coming down from the front, or pause to acclimatize before marching up to relieve their comrades, who are rotated out every two to eight weeks to prevent high-altitude sickness and brain damage.

The Ghyari base consists of a dozen neatly whitewashed buildings and a 600-year-old mosque established by Sayyid Ali Hamadani, who introduced Islam to Baltistan in the 14th century. A few steps from the mosque sits an underground bunker that serves as a studio for a young man named Makhtar, who paints portraits of the shaheeds, or martyrs - soldiers who have been killed in this war and thereby gained admission to paradise. The Pakistanis believe their religious faith gives them motivation that the Indians lack. "The concepts of jihad and shahadat - or 'life after death' - help us strike hard," explained Major Sikendar Hayat, 41, second in command at Ghyari. "It is what we call a force-multiplier."

Islam isn't the only influence on this army; as is true on the Indian side, its rituals are clearly British. At the heart of the base sits a crude cricket field said to be the highest in the world. On our first afternoon at Ghyari, a Sunday, the officers gathered on a row of folding chairs to watch a match. In front of them was a low table with a field telephone that squawked every few minutes as posts called in reports.

After two hours of casual cricket talk - "Good batting, sir!". . . "Shabash! Well done!" - the game was halted for high tea. The officers rearranged their chairs in a circle while the sirdar, a bearded man in a white lace skullcap, started serving them. Without warning, a massive, hollow boom resounded from the ridges up near the front lines.

"Artillery?" asked Major Sikendar, looking behind him.

"Rockslide," responded a second officer.

"Must be artillery," said a third.

"Phone!" barked the commanding officer, a chiseled lieutenant colonel on his third tour of Siachen duty.

Sikendar seized the green field telephone, cranked the handle, listened, grunted. Everyone else stared at the ground. After a minute or two, it emerged that dynamite was being used to clear a route blocked by a landslide. The tension ratcheted down a notch, but the tea was now cold. Sunday afternoon cricket was over.

THAT EVENING IN THE OFFICERS' MESS, three guests on loan from other regiments were entertained prior to returning to their home units. The C.O. singled out one young captain for special praise: Safdar Malik, 30, who had just descended from a post called Tabish, which sits on the northwest side of Bilafond La. It takes six days to reach Tabish from Ghyari, traveling by night to avoid Indian snipers and artillery. The final approach requires troops to jumar up ropes anchored to a rock wall, exposing them to sniper fire from several Indian posts hundreds of feet above. Once you get to the post, you're sure to be pounded relentlessly by Indian rockets.

"We never keep track," one captain who had served there told me, "because if one counts, he completely forgets himself."

Tabish was established during a brutal firefight in September 1987, when the Pakistanis lost a crucial high post known as Qaid, then failed to push the Indians off the neighboring ridge. Last spring, when Captain Safdar was there, Tabishs problems were aggravated by an avalanche of rocks that damaged several bunkers. Safdar apparently acquitted himself well during this crisis.

"Your leadership was exemplary," the C.O. announced. "Young officers like you are the reason why we continue to dominate the enemy. Officers like you are the reason why we will ultimately prevail in this war."

Life at such forward positions is brutal, and the Indians begrudgingly admit that the Pakistanis are tough customers. "They are sitting right underneath us on an 80-degree slope," one Indian officer who was stationed above Tabish would tell me later. "We can throw grenades just like pebbles on top of them. It really takes guts to be there." Captain Waqas Malik, 26, who served at Tabish, grimly described the hopeless feeling of such positions. "Once a ridge has been occupied," he said, "you require a heart with the capacity of the ocean to accept the casualties you will incur in the taking of it."

Each high post is manned by a squad of six to 18 men commanded by a young officer, usually a captain, and space is tight - a couple of fiberglass igloos, machine-gun platforms, a latrine, and a tiny area for religious worship. Each soldier is in charge of a particular weapon: light machine guns (LMGs), mortars, anti-aircraft guns. The men stay out of sight by day and stand watch by night.

Unlike mountaineers, who usually climb during the best weather, Siachen soldiers endure the worst the mountains can throw at them, year-round. Avalanches are frequent and terrifying; their thunder is so great that it's often impossible to distinguish from shelling. Blizzards can last 20 days. Winds reach speeds of 125 miles per hour; temperatures can plunge to minus 60 degrees. Annual snowfall exceeds 35 feet. During storms, two or three men have to shovel snow at all times. If they stop, they will never catch up and the post will be buried alive.

"Sometimes in the winter, you see nothing but white," said Captain Jamil Salamat, 24, the medical officer at Ghyari. "And you think, Maybe I will never make it back. That is the hugeness, and the hugeness has its own effect. It's overwhelming. The snow is like an ocean up there."

In such extreme cold, the single most important resource is kerosene. Known as "K2 oil," it is used for cooking, melting snow for water, thawing out frozen guns, and keeping warm. It gives off a noxious smoke that coats the igloos with grime; for months after they descend, soldiers cough up black gunk.

Survival under these conditions requires specialized equipment. There are 112 separate items in a Pakistani soldier's high-altitude kit, including two types of oxygen canisters, three models of ice axes, three kinds of rope, 29 sizes of pitons, five different pairs of gloves, three types of socks, a puffy white down suit rated to minus 60, and a black plastic "nuclear-biological-chemical warfare face mask." The Pakistani gear that I saw seemed to be generally low-quality stuff; most of it carried the brand name Technoworld, which no one I spoke to in the outdoor industry had ever heard of. In contrast, Indian soldiers get state-of-the-art gear from a wide range of highly specialized Western firms like Koflach, Asolo, and Black Diamond.

The monetary cost of these posts is enormous. A liter of kerosene that goes for 19 rupees in Rawalpindi costs Pakistan more than 650 rupees by the time it's been hauled to 19,000 feet. (On the Indian side, almost every pound of supplies, including the artillery pieces, is flown in by helicopter because there are no roads on the glacier, pushing transportation costs ten times higher.) Each summer in the Ghyari sector alone, more than 35 Pakistani bases, gun positions, and fighting posts have to be stocked with some 2,000 tons of ammunition, rations, and fuel. This material is freighted to Ghyari by truck and hauled up the ice on mule and donkey trains. To prevent snowblindness, the pack animals are equipped with specially made glacier goggles. Sometimes they stumble and plummet into the crevasses. "They scream for an hour until they freeze to death," one of the muleteers told me. "It is terrible to hear."

Over 90 percent of the casualties on both sides are caused by weather, terrain, and what mountaineers call "objective dangers." Above 18,000 feet, the human body cannot acclimatize and simply starts to deteriorate. Soldiers fall ill, lose their appetites, can't sleep, and have problems with memory. Severe frostbite - all it takes is touching a gun barrel with bare hands - can result in the loss of fingers and toes. The two most serious killers are HAPE (high-altitude pulmonary edema) and HACE (high-altitude cerebral edema). Men suffering from HAPE, an accumulation of fluid in the lungs, cough up a pink froth and can be dead in a matter of hours. With HACE, fluid leaks from oxygen-starved blood vessels in the brain, causing severe swelling, headaches, hallucinations, and dementia. Untreated, HACE can kill a man within 24 hours.

In settings like this, suffering is often transformed into legend. The Pakistanis tell of a post beyond Sia La, at nearly 22,000 feet, that is said to have three separate cracks in the ice known as Three-Man Crevasse, Five-Man Crevasse, and Eight-Man Crevasse - each named for the number of men who died falling in. Soldiers talk of men losing their minds and leaping from the posts to their deaths. Some say their tormented cries can be heard in the wind over the peaks. And then there's the story about the platoon killed in an early battle at Bilafond La, whose bodies froze into such grotesque positions that their corpses had to be hacked into pieces before they could be placed in helicopter panniers and brought down for return to their families.

Whether such tales are true is less important than what they symbolize about the futility of Siachen duty. "From what I've read, no one has ever been stupid enough to fight at this level before," an officer at Ghyari remarked one afternoon when none of his colleagues were within earshot. "I hope it won't be repeated again, because it's a waste. A big, bloody waste."

THE ARTILLERY FIRE HAD BEEN so fierce during the summer of 2002 that the Pakistani top brass delayed our trek to the front. But on our third day at Ghyari, they gave the go-ahead: We would be escorted by a squad of eight soldiers who had been ordered to relieve Captain Yasin Rafiq, the commander of a post called Sher.

Sher is perched at 19,600 feet on a ridge at the head of the Chumik Glacier, a short, steep tributary that comes crashing down into the Bilafond Glacier from the northeast and is one of the few Pakistani positions on the Saltoro that commands the high ground. It took us three days to hike there. On the third day, we reached a field of metal shards from exploded Indian artillery shells. Soaring above us was a huge crescent-shaped saddle. To get to its crest - where we could see the tiny black spot that was Sher - we had to ascend a thousand-foot snow-and-ice wall, pulling ourselves up on fixed ropes.

At the top, we caught our breath beside an 81mm mortar tube, then stepped into the post itself. Sher is only about 12 feet wide and 40 feet long. On one side are two fiberglass igloos where the men eat, cook, and sleep. On the other are a hulking 14.5mm Chinese-made anti-aircraft gun, a machine-gun bunker, and, higher up the ridge, a tiny observation post. We hobbled across 12 feet of frozen mud, stepped up to a stretch of rope serving as a guardrail, and stared down a 3,500-foot drop to the Indian front lines.

We were greeted by Captain Yasin, 29, who had been at his post for 82 days. Yasin pointed out an Indian supply base less than three miles away on the glacier below (from this distance, it was a brown spot on the ice), an Indian seasonal observation post (which we couldn't see), and an Indian helicopter route. He announced grandly that this was the first time foreigners had been permitted to visit Sher.

Above the post, the ridge rose to a massive double peak called Naveed Top. In April 1989, the Indian army launched a mission known as Operation Ibex; its aim was to capture this peak and force the Pakistanis to vacate the entire upper portion of the Chumik Glacier. Three teams of Pakistani soldiers attempted to reach the summit to thwart the Indian operation and failed; one team was wiped out by an avalanche, the others halted by overhanging seracs. A last-ditch decision was made to airlift troops to a point just below the top of the 22,185foot mountain using French Lama helicopters designed to fly no higher than 21,000 feet.

The air was so thin, the pilots feared they would crash if they attempted to hover. So after stripping as much excess weight as they could, they used a maneuver called a "running drop," which required an individual soldier dangling from the bottom to be dropped onto the peak as they passed over. The first to make it was a 29-year-old lieutenant named Naveed-ur-Rehman. He was soon joined by a sergeant named Mohammed Yakub. But then a storm blew in and both men were forced to huddle on the mountain without supplies for two nights.

"The wind was so strong," Naveed, who is now a major, later told me, "that we had to dig in our heels to avoid being carried away." Over the next 40 days, six choppers relayed 86 soldiers and 38 tons of supplies onto the peak. Two Pakistani soldiers died and 30 were wounded during the defense of Naveed Top. That May - after the Indian advance was halted by a massive avalanche that killed a large number of their troops - both sides agreed to demilitarize the summit.

Or so say the Pakistanis. To this day, the Indian army denies that any of this ever happened.

That evening, after the sun went down, the men at Sher all crammed into the largest igloo for what Captain Yasin called "after-dinner discussion." It began with the sergeant, or havildar, thumping out a beat on an empty jerry can using a carabiner. The men began singing in Pashto, while Yasin - who is a hafiz which means he has memorized the entire Koran - translated for me. It was a song about the cruelty of beautiful women, he said, about the rigidity of their hearts and the shallowness of their sincerity. Then the men shifted to Urdu, the language of the Mogul poets and Sufi mystics. They sang of how the affection between men and women has the power to transcend social caste. They sang about an aspect of love so complex and subtle that Yasin said it was impossible to translate and advised me to just sit back and enjoy the music.

After the singing stopped, Yasin and I stepped outside. The moon was surrounded by a rainbow-colored ring, harbinger of a storm, and the peaks were cast in a milky glow. From the shadows came a disembodied voice in Urdu.

"Beautiful night, sir."

"Mehboob, is that you?" said Yasin to a lone sentry who had volunteered to stand watch so that his companions could hobnob with the guests.

"Sir."

"Captain," I said, "could you ask Mehboob what it feels like to stand watch on a night like this?" Yasin asked, and the reply came floating down.

"Mehboob says that a night such as this makes him feel good because he can see forever, and this helps him to perform his duty of observing the enemy. And he also says that the moonlight gives him a feeling of much refreshness."

"Refreshness?"

"Yes. Much refreshness."

Before ducking back inside, I took a long look. Somewhere out there, roughly 14 miles to the northeast, lay the Siachen - the heart of the conflict. To reach it, we would have to retrace our steps back to Islamabad; fly to Dubai, then to New Delhi, than to Ladahk, the most remote and northern part of Kashmir; and from there drive up to the glacier - a loop of more than 3,000 miles to get to a place I could almost see from where I stood. All because of a four-inch line on a map.

BEFORE LEAVING PAKISTAN I heard quite a few remarks about Narinder "Bull" Kumar, a legendary Indian military man and mountaineer, and none of them were complimentary. "Colonel Kumar is the man who started all this," Major Tahir had fumed. "I have no wish to meet him - that bastard."

The insults did little to prepare me for the bald, friendly man who was brimming with good humor and charm when we met at the New Delhi airport. Kumar, now 69, is short and powerful, still packed with thick muscle from his days as a climber. He has a thin white mustache, an endearing propensity for laughing at his own jokes, and an enormous fondness for beer.

Kumar's family originally came from Rawalpindi and moved, just before Partition, to what is now the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. After graduating from the Indian Military Academy in 1954, he joined the army and was earmarked for the cavalry. But in 1958 he got the chance to attend the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling, run at the time by Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who summited Everest with Hillary. Inspired, Kumar flung himself into high-altitude mountaineering and began racking up notable achievements.

In 1965 he handled the logistics for India's first successful expedition to Everest, which placed nine men on the summit, then a record. In 1970 he led the first recognized ascent of 23,997-foot Chomo Lhari, the highest mountain in Bhutan. And in 1977 he headed up the first ascent of the difficult northeast spur of Kanchenjunga. The nickname Bull comes from his tendency to charge relentlessly into whatever he's doing. He's a national hero in India, the star of seven films, six books, and two postage stamps. These days he's a successful businessman in New Delhi and, with his 32-year-old son, Akshay, runs an adventure travel company called Mercury Himalayan Explorations, which we had hired for the task of getting us to the Siachen Glacier.

Kumar's involvement with the Siachen dates back to 1977, when he was approached by a German rafter who wanted to undertake the first descent of the Nubra River from its source at the snout of the glacier. The man brought Kumar a map of northeastern Kashmir that had an unusual feature. Beyond NJ9842, the point where the Kashmir cease-fire line ends and an invisible line was supposed to run "thence north to the glaciers," the map depicted a straight line canting off at a dramatic northeastern angle and terminating on the Chinese border at Karakoram Pass. The story behind this line, which suggested that the Siachen Glacier lay squarely inside Pakistan, remains mysterious to this day. One theory, however, is that it was drawn by the U.S. military.

Back in 1962, India and China got into a brief war over the Aksai Chin, a 15,440.square-mile section of high desert east of the Karakoram that was claimed by both countries. Several months before the fighting ended (resulting in a crushing defeat for India), the U.S. government provided an airlift to aid beleaguered Indian troops. Five years later, the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency, a division of the Defense Department, published a Tactical Pilotage Chart for northern Kashmir. TPCs, which are designed to help military pilots avoid trespassing into another country's airspace, sometimes delineate borders by making reference to prominent geographical features easily distinguishable from the air. Karakoram Pass, which stands out among an otherwise indistinguishable sea of snow-capped peaks, was one of these.

Whatever its murky origins may have been, the DMA's Tactical Pilotage Chart for 1967 was the first recorded instance of the line connecting NJ9842 to Karakoram Pass. Over the next several years, it was reproduced by some of the most prominent publishers in international cartography, which often u s e DMA maps as a source of information. "When I saw this map," Kumar told me, "it didn't take more than a split second to say it was wrong! I was the one who discovered this."

In short order, Kumar got his hands on journal reports from the international expeditions that had traveled from Pakistan into the Siachen. In January 1978, he took his findings to Lieutenant General M. L. Chibber, India's director of military operations. Chibber quickly obtained permission for Kumar to mount a reconnaissance expedition to the Siachen. That summer Kumar led 40 climbers and 30 porters up to the glacier's halfway point, and from there a summit team of three completed an ascent of 24,297-foot Teram Kangri II. The team also came across the sort of evidence that Chibber was looking for.

"We found labels from tin cans and cigarette packs with Pakistani names, German and Japanese equipment," recalled Kumar. "It was this that convinced the government of India that Pakistan was going where it should not have been."

In the summer of 1981, Kumar went back with a 70-member team and a completed a snout-to-source traverse of the glacier. In eight weeks, they climbed Saltoro Kangri I (25,400 feet) and Sia Kangri I (24,350), hiked to the top of Indira Col (the watershed at the north end of the glacier), and skied Bilafond La.

"There wasn't a soul there," Kumar recalled of those adventures. "There was so much to climb - so many uncharted high peaks! And those pinnacles - rock pinnacles going straight up! And small glacial streams - so blue and so cold! The view from Sia Kangri looking down on the Siachen was such a beautiful sight. Just like a great white snake going, going, going. I have never seen anything so white and so wide."

Later that year, Kumar published an account of his journeys in the newsmagazine Illustrated Weekly of India. This set off alarms in Pakistan, and by the summer of 1983 military expeditions were probing the glacier on both sides. By then Chibber had been sent to Leh and was running India's Northern Command. He concluded that the only way to secure the glacier was to preempt the Pakistanis and seize Bilafond La and Sia La. In mid-April 1984, two platoons of Ladakh Scouts were airlifted onto the Siachen. On April 17, two Pakistani helicopters were sent out for reconnaissance, one of them piloted by Colonel Muhammad Farooq Altaf. They reached Sia La that afternoon.

"We could see a party of Indian soldiers," recalled Altaf, who is now retired and lives in Islamabad. "I was in the number-two helicopter, and the number-one helicopter had just turned back when one chap started firing. In our postflight check after returning to Dansam, we found bullet holes near the tail rotor. These were the first-ever bullets fired in Siachen." He shook his head and smiled. "They beat us by one week. Too bad."

General Chibber's strategy had worked. But he soon realized that if they wanted to retain control of the passes, Indian troops would have to spend the winter at altitude. This was a new kind of warfare, and Chibber used every trick he could think of to stack the odds in India's favor. He flew in prefabricated fiberglass igloos designed for Antarctic expeditions. He persuaded the Dalai Lama to confer a special blessing on a set of silk bracelets for the Ladakhi troops. In February 1985, the Pakistanis attacked Bilafond La but failed to dislodge the Indian troops. When spring arrived, Chibber's men were still in place.

"And that's when the race started," recalls Brigadier Muhammad Bashir Baz, who commanded a Pakistani helicopter unit in the Siachen theater from 1987 to 1989. "Each side started climbing any peak they could. Then the other side would go and occupy a neighboring higher peak. And so on, and so on, until they reached 22,000 feet. That is how this war unfolded."

AFTER MEETING KUMAR, Teru and I flew to Leh, the 11,500-foot capital of Buddhist Ladakh. There we met Yaseen, our uncontainably cheerful Kashmiri guide, and a liaison officer assigned by the Indian army to chaperon us on our trek across the glacier: Somnil Das, a 24-year-old infantry captain who had recently spent four months commanding a post above Bilafond La. His job was to make sure that we didn't see anything we weren't authorized to see.

To get from Leh to the snout of the glacier, we hired two jeeps and headed in a snowstorm up the single-lane road that ascends through miles of steep switchbacks before it crosses Khardung La, at 18,380 feet the highest paved highway pass in the world. We descended into the Nubra Valley. The surrounding ridges were naked and brown, as smooth as a fossilized dinosaur bone. The snow turned to rain, the rain ended, and the afternoon filled with a pale lavender light. Now the road started climbing again, and flowers appeared: the wild, tangled Sia roses that gave the glacier its name. Das swiveled around in the front seat.

"Hey, would you guys like to hear some rock?" he asked, shoving a tape of Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion II into the jeep's cassette deck.

"So what exactly happened to these guys?" asked Das. "I heard that they all became drug addicts and that the band is no more." Teru informed Das that while various members of the band have had their problems, Axl Rose is still around.

"That's really a shame. That guy was too good on the guitar. I used to love listening to him at my post." He stole a glance out the front windshield.

"Okay," he said. "That's it, the snout of the glacier. Can you see the pinnacles? Total ice. Absolute ice."

There it was, immense and gray and hulking, a 200-foot wall of boulders and gravel and muddy ooze. It plugged the entire valley from end to end, surrounded by 19,000-foot fangs shooting almost straight into the air. From a dark hole beneath the ice roared the Nubra River, roiling and chalky, laden with grit.

Base camp for the Siachen theater is tucked into the western side of the valley, just short of the snout. Little more than a dirt lot holding about 35 brown-and-green rectangular buildings, it

is the nexus for the worlds highest, most expensive, and longest-running military air operation. Two days earlier a glacial surge of ice and boulders had coughed out of the mouth of the Nubra and obliterated the steel suspension bridge leading to base camp. We turned onto a temporary bridge that the engineers had thrown up in 24 hours and rattled across, passing under a brightly painted sign that announced, HERE FORTITUDE AND COURAGE IS THE NORM. Up ahead was a tall pole that displayed a bright green flag.

"Green indicates there's no casualties on the glacier," explained Das. "A red flag signals that someone has been injured. Black means death." Our jeeps came to a halt.

"Well, we're here," he said. "Welcome to the Siachen."

WITH DAS IN THE LEAD, our party set out on foot. The plan for the first day was to hike five hours to Camp I and rest overnight. From there we would follow a northwesterly route, passing through Camps II and III, until we reached Kumar Base, about 25 miles into the middle of the glacier. The whole trek, to Kumar and back, would take nine days.

It was late September by now. The autumn snows had already begun, and each day the temperatures, which hovered in the thirties, seemed to drop more. We slept in the tents or in the fiberglass huts; we ate meals that Yaseen prepared by the light of a candle stuck to the lid of an oatmeal can.

One morning, about an hour before the sun hit the ice, Yaseen came into the tent and beckoned me outside. "Come! Come!" It was our first clear day; the sun was turning the tops of the peaks gold. "Look at the faces of these mountains!" he marveled. "See how beautiful they are? See how special? The mountains here, they tug at your heart." He grabbed the front of my jacket and gave it a sharp yank. "We call this kashish, which in Urdu means 'attraction' or 'pull.' Can you feel it?"

What I felt was a low vibration coming from the rotor blades of three high-altitude Cheetah helicopters beating their way up the glacier in close formation. They looked like tiny green insects - delicate, bulb-headed dragonflies with red underbellies. This was the first of more than 17 sorties moving supplies up to the bases and posts that day.

Our progress was slow but steady, with Captain Das gradually revealing a few things about himself as we trudged. Most Indian officers come from parts of the country that have long-standing military traditions, such as the Punjab. Das is from Bengal, a place better known for producing poetry, philosophy, and India's first Miss Universe. He grew up in Calcutta, acting in theater companies and singing for a band called Trash Pool. He was studying to be an accountant when he abruptly decided in May 2000 to enter the Military Training Academy in Madras. Six feet tall, with dark skin and black hair, Das has the rigid bearing of an officer coupled with a sad-eyed air. He volunteered to serve on the Siachen because, as he put it, "I'd never been on anything adventurous before, and I thought it would be good."

His post, whose name he refused to disclose, is at 19,700 feet and is one of several key positions the Indians hold above Bilafond La. It looks directly down on Tabish, the besieged Pakistani post where Captain Safdar endured the rockslide. It took Das and his squad more than two weeks to trek up the glacier from base camp; the final stretch required an ascent up ropes anchored to a 460-foot ice wall. They got there on January 21, 2002, and spent the first week getting used to the shelling.

The Pakistanis fired an average of ten rounds every 24 hours when the weather was clear - usually after lunch, but also at night. Each incoming shell announced itself with a sizzling wail. At the first sound of a barrage, Das would order his squad to take cover in a nearby ice cave while he and two other soldiers took lookout positions. Most of the shells landed in soft snow and were duds; only those that struck rock or ice would detonate - unless they were airburst shells, which have fuses timed to explode before they hit the ground. "The splinters come out sounding like a hundred people screaming," said Das. "You have no idea where the next shell is going to land. It's terrifying."

By the middle of February, Das and his men had adapted to the shelling and the sleep-all-day, up-all-night routine. The cold was a different story. Even with all their clothes on - five pairs of socks, three pairs of gloves, a down jacket-they shivered miserably in their double sleeping bags. The latrine presented another problem.

"After a bunch of guys take a shit, it's impossible to clear it away," Das explained. "Pouring boiling water on it, or banging on it with an ice ax, won't work - it just keeps building up. So those mounds, we would have to clean them with our machine guns. Cock an LMG - tacka-tacka-tacka - and it breaks into tiny pieces of rock-shit. They fly in the air. A couple times a week is enough."

In March, a cake and a white puppy with black spots made the trip up the ice wall via a gas-powered winch. The cake was for Das's birthday; he turned 24 on March 7. The puppy was named after the post, so Das refused to tell me its name. It slept in Das's sleeping bag and survived on butter, rice, and chocolate. During Das's downtime, he read his way through every book in the post's "library," including the complete works of Jane Austen and Into Thin Air.

In April the routine took a turn for the worse. "It just kept snowing and snowing and snowing," said Das. "It was like somebody pouring truckloads of snow on top of you." At three o'clock one morning, a massive avalanche wiped out an entire Indian post near Das's ridge. Five men were killed. It took the 11 survivors more than eight hours to dig themselves out, under enemy fire. "This happened right in front of my post," said Das. "It was like the sky breaking on your head."

On May 21, Das and his squad were relieved, and he handed his dog over to the new commander. He had spent 120 days at 19,700 feet. No mountaineer in the world can make such a claim.

I asked if he ever wanted to go back.

"Never," he said. "Not in my life. I went up to the post hoping for some action. But to have a shell land right on top of where you are, with the splinters flying, it scares the shit out of you. Once you've been under fire, you never want it again."

IT TOOK US FOUR DAYS to reach Kumar Base, which sits at a point where two other glaciers come crashing in. From the northeast, toward China, the icefall from Teram Shehr cuts a broad swath across the east side of the Siachen. From the southwest, toward Pakistan, the Lolofond Glacier descends from Bilafond La in a gentle roll.

The base floats above the surface like an ice ship. At the bow and stern are two platforms that serve as helicopter pads. In the middle is a warren of dirty parachute tents and fiberglass huts connected by a lane of wooden pallets. Running down the sides are streams of refuse and thin brown smears of frozen feces. In the distance, you can see other camps rising raggedly out of the moraine, each looking like it has just been through a ruinous siege. All of these are connected to Kumar by a four-inch-thick black plastic umbilical cord known as the K2 pipeline, which snakes up the center of the glacier. Once or twice a month, the pipe bursts. The breach is usually repaired within a few hours, hut a big hole can result in as much as 7,000 liters of kerosene spewing onto the ice and draining into the crevasses.

From the top of Kumar, you have a splendid view of the Siachen's white skin, the white peaks that wall it in, and a dense ring of odd white pillars stretching out from every side of the base. These pillars are the remains of 19 years of parachute supply drops. Over time, as the ice has melted and refrozen, they have risen about five feet above the surface. Most appear to have a head, shoulders, and a torso. There arc thousands of them, and from above they look disturbingly human.

This scene is bizarre enough by day, but at night it becomes truly ghastly: a frozen necropolis of trash, a Golgotha of ice haunted by the spirits of the dead. When the wind subsides and the moon rises and you gaze out at the cordon of pillars shrouded in the pleated folds of the parachutes, it looks like you've been encircled by an army of ghouls, as if all the soldiers slain in these mountains have risen from their icy graves and gathered before Kumar to stand in mute judgment of what they have done to one another, and to the balance of nature. "This is the most depraved thing I've ever seen," Tcru whispered one night. "I don't know if this is war. But it's definitely hell."

There is not much cause for optimism with regard to the future of this hell. Since 1986, India and Pakistan have sat down seven times to hammer out some kind of solution to the Siachen war. Although they've come tantalizingly close to an agreement more than once, the talks have broken down each time, and the Kargil incursion of 1999 drove a stake through the heart of any rapprochement for the foreseeable future. What's worse-as if this situation could possibly get any worse-an end to hostilities on the glacier is inextricably tied to perhaps the toughest geopolitical mess of all: achieving peace in Kashmir.

Meanwhile, the corrosive detritus of war keeps metastasizing. The Indian army has an impressive scheme to try to clean the glacier by building a gargantuan aerial cableway that will cart supplies up and carry waste down. And Harish Kapadia, a well-known Indian mountaineer, is trying to galvanize a grassroots campaign to turn the region into an "international peace park" that Pakistan and India would share. But that seems highly unlikely. As Colonel Kumar told me back in New Delhi: "There's no sharing to be done. The Siachen belongs to us."

On our final evening at Kumar Base, I sat down on a rock to watch as a storm moved in over the Saltoro. The clouds were scudding along the tops of the peaks, and the sky was bruised a deep purple. I turned to the north. Somewhere up there, over on the other side of Bilafond La, the Pakistani soldiers at Tabish were gearing up to endure another night at their post. I looked south. Farther down the glacier, the men at Sher were undoubtedly doing the same. The storm would probably clobber both posts, but for the moment, the Siachen front was very still.

And then something strange happened. The wasteland disappeared and I saw only the great peaks, the great bowl of dark sky, the great ice serpent of the glacier. The sadness and despair of our journey fell away and left only desire: the desire to strike off across the glacier toward Bilafond La and climb its ridgeline. The desire to ski down the gentle slope of the Lolofond Glacier, as Colonel Kumar had done during that magical summer of 1981 The desire to go marching off toward Indira Col, to posthole up its sugary flanks and gaze into the white wastes of China. Like Yaseen, I wanted to come here without restrictions and without confinements; to set up a base camp with some friends; to scale every peak that struck my fancy, for as long as it took mc to swallow them all or be swallowed up by them.

I wanted to do all these thinks, and I knew that they were all impossible. The most that was possible - and this was a lot, I realized - was to feel the pull of these mountains, a pull that is powerful enough to transcend the war and the squalor and the shame of everything else that has happened here. If you go to the Siachen, the very best you can hope for is to know the meaning of kashish.

It's a good read. Got this from some place else, sharing with people here.
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Fri, 26 Apr 2019 09:53:26 GMTI've been writing this book for the past 3-1/2 years, and earlier this week I declared it done.
Now, I need to find a publisher.

Brief description: An analysis of the constitutional, political, economic, and institutional short-comings of Hong Kong’s ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement, and how to begin the process of restoring the fortunes of a once great business and financial center.

Category: Hong Kong; China; current events

Audience: The primary audience is assumed to have a basic familiarity with Hong Kong and its transition from a British Crown Colony to the first Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. The secondary audience will be university libraries and course reading lists, research institutions, think tanks, and government and diplomatic readers.

Purpose and need: The constraints imposed on political development by the Basic Law, interference by Mainland officials in the SAR’s internal affairs, and the structural limitations of an executive-led government have brought Hong Kong to the brink of being ungovernable. The Legislative Council periodically goes on strike, increasing numbers of young people are taking to the streets to express their dissatisfaction, and the ever-present threat of Mainland interference looms larger each year. Understanding the causes, and possible solutions to the current state of affairs requires examination of the roots of the present conflict and the interests of those encouraging their continuation.

Current interest: Since Mrs. Carrie Lam took office in early 2017, the crack-down on dissent has intensified, raising comment and concern in London, Washington, and among international pressure groups.
Competing works: Analysis of current Hong Kong politics in the English language tends to be highly academic. It is mainly to be found in university libraries and peer-reviewed scholarly journals that are only infrequently accessible to the educated lay reader. This work proposes to address that shortfall.

Proposed back cover copy: Twenty years after the Handover, the experimental “one country, two system” political arrangement is facing its greatest challenges. Street protests, legislative log jams, political disappearances, and open interference in Hong Kong’s internal affairs by Mainland officials are threatening to make the SAR ungovernable. Before a full-blown crisis dictates unpalatable responses, steps must be taken to redistribute power, revitalize the roles of the Chief Executive and Legislative Council, and rein in Beijing’s role in Hong Kong’s strictly domestic affairs.

Chapter outline:

Ch 1 Setting the scene
Ch 2 A series of unfortunate events
Ch 3 Governing constraints
Ch 4 What needs to be done
Ch 5 Policy options: taxes, land, and money
Ch 6 The future of Hong Kong
Acronyms and abbreviations
Significant events: a time line
Who’s Who
Political parties and other actors
Index
Endnotes
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